{"id":10785,"date":"2011-10-18T03:10:03","date_gmt":"2011-10-18T03:10:03","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-10-15T11:01:40","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T11:01:40","slug":"film-underscores-koreans-growing-anger-over-sex-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=10785","title":{"rendered":"Film Underscores Koreans’ Growing Anger Over Sex Crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

At an appeals court in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 2006, a school official was convicted of raping a 13-year-old deaf girl and sentenced to one year in prison. When the verdict came, an outraged middle-aged man, also deaf, let out an incomprehensible cry from the galley, signaling frantically with sign language. Chung Yoo-mi portrayed the human rights activist Seo Yoo-jin in a courtroom scene from the movie “The Crucible.” It was clear that the man was shouting, \u2018This is wrong! This is wrong!\u201d\u2019 Lee Ji-won, a newspaper intern, wrote in her blog later that day under the subject line, \u201cI saw the foul underside of our society.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

The man was forcibly removed for disrupting the courtroom. And that might have been the end of it. Except that the intern\u2019s blog inspired a best-selling author, Gong Ji-young, to write a novel based on the sexual assaults at the Inhwa School for the hearing impaired, the school\u2019s attempts to conceal the abuses and the victims\u2019 struggle for justice. Now, a film based on that novel \u2014 \u201cDogani,\u201d or \u201cThe Crucible\u201d \u2014 has roiled South Korea. Since its release on Sept. 22, 4.4 million people, including President Lee Myung-bak \u2014 nearly a 10th of the country\u2019s population \u2014 have seen it. The film has tapped into widespread anger over official reluctance to take sexual crimes seriously, and over how justice is served, or not, in South Korea. The cabinet has vowed to inspect all facilities for the disabled and minors to ferret out teachers with records of sexual abuse. The head of the Supreme Court admitted that \u201csociety is simmering with resentment\u201d toward a legal system long criticized as \u201cyujeonmujoe mujeonnyujoe,\u201d or \u201cnot guilty for the rich, guilty for the poor.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for sexual crimes. The Education Ministry has said it will shut down Inhwa School. For a low-budget movie barred to people under 18, \u201cThe Crucible\u201d has had an extraordinary impact. In a way, that reaction seems at odds with South Korean society. Here, disregard for the disabled is so entrenched that the subway authorities began installing elevators for wheelchair access only in recent years following protests by the handicapped in which they chained themselves to the tracks with signs that read, \u201cWe want to use the subway too.\u201d \u201cWhat people see in the movie is a capsule version of their society,\u201d said Chun Sang-chin, a sociologist at Sogang University. \u201cThere is anger over how the strong bully the weak, despair over how the system protects the well-connected, and fear that the same can happen to the rest of us.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

Dogani Trailer<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n